The Overlord Process Governance (CDL) Team are pleased to announce the availability for version 1.0.M2 of the Overlord Process Governance (CDL) component.

The two main changes in this release are (1) the addition of a "lighter weight" approach to the "conversation aware" ESB actions mechanism, and (2) the introduction of WS-BPEL generation from the choreography description.

This "conversation aware" mechanism in M1 required state information to be persisted for each service instance, and used by subsequent invocations of the same service instance to understand its context within a business transaction. However this has added a significant overhead in the implementation and execution of the service. Therefore this M2 release introduces a lighter weight approach. The previous M1 approach is still available and referred to as the 'stateful' approach, whilst the new approach is referred to as 'stateless'. As the name suggests, this new approach does not require the service to persist and use state information. The only requirement is that it uses a few custom ESB actions that enable the behaviour of the service to be inferred and used to check for conformance against a choreography description.

The WS-BPEL generation is the first stage towards more general support for WS-BPEL governance against a choreography description. Subsequent milestones will enhance the generative capabilities (including generating the appropriate WSDL) as well as providing conformance checking to ensure the BPEL process conforms to the expected behaviour as defined in a choreography description.

Feedback on this release, and suggestions for features in subsequent releases, would be appreciated and can be recorded either in the Overlord User Forum or by creating an entry in the JIRA issue tracking system.